A Burning Patience

"And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities."
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Sunday, October 23, 2011

The sound says that freedom exists

Poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this year. Generally I don't give a great deal of attention to who the Nobel or other such awards are given to -- such prizes and prestige seem far from the details and routines of my life and the lives of people I know. I was interested to hear the news about Tranströmer, however. His poetry has been deeply important to me since I first read him, in translation, more than 35 years ago.

I first read Transtromer's poems in the book Friends, You Drank Some Darkness, a selection of three Swedish poets -- Harry Martinson (himself also a Nobel laureate), Gunnar Ekelöf, and Tomas Tranströmer -- chosen and translated by Robert Bly, published 1975 by Beacon Press; the book includes the original Swedish of the poems. I liked the work of all three of the poets; I found myself immediately drawn to Tranströmer's poems in particular.

I find in Tranströmer's poems a quiet introspective quality, whether the ostensible subject matter of the poems is things and events in the exterior world or entirely the happenings of inner life. Tranströmer worked for many years as a psychologist, and the nature of such work makes a steady background presence in his poems, and sometimes emerges more explicitly. His poems are the poems of someone who spends much time listening to the collective psyche, and asking questions about what it means to be a human being in the modern world.

From the poem "Track" ("Spår"), in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness (from which the quoted passages here are taken, unless otherwise noted):

2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stoppedout in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dreamhe will never remember that he was therewhen he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sicknessthat his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm,feeble and cold on the horizon.

I live in a place (Minneapolis) known for cold winters; at the time of winter solstice here, the nights last about 15 and a half hours. Sweden, where Tranströmer has lived all his life, has a climate similar, if not identical, and is further north, and the winter nights are longer. Certainly I felt an affinity for the daily world that shows up in Tranströmer's poems when I first read his work. Minnesota and the surrounding region also has had a large history of immigration from the Scandinavian countries, and echoes persist here of the cultures of that part of the world. It was early spring when I first read Tranströmer's poems, and it continually struck me how the cool damp earth smell of the spring nights seemed to drift up from his poems as I read them.

There are stark winter days when the sea has linksto the mountain areas, hunched over in feathery grayness,blue for a moment, then the waves for hours are like palelynxes, trying to get a grip on the gravelly shore. [...]

[...] (In the Far North the real lynx walks, with sharpened clawsand dream eyes. In the Far North where the daylives in a pit night and day.

There the sole survivor sits by the furnaceof the Northern Lights, and listens to the musiccoming from the men frozen to death.)

(From the poem "Sailor's Tale," "Skepparhistoria" in the original Swedish.)

Tranströmer's poems are not, for the most part, politically explicit in their content or subject matter, at least the the usual sense. But the realities of the world we live in are never far away, and the poems do move with evident conscience, even when the subject matter isn't obviously political in nature. I think, for instance, of some lines from his poem "Allegro" (the title is the same in Swedish):

I play Haydn after a black dayand feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.The sound is green, lively and still.

The sound says that freedom existsand that someone does not pay tax to Caesar.

(The translation of the above lines is based on Robert Bly's translation, however I've changed the word order in a couple of the lines to something that seems to me closer to the original Swedish.)

Or, similarly, these lines from the poem "The Scattered Congregation" ("Den Skingrade Församlingen"):

2.Inside the church, pillars and vaultingwhite as plaster, like the castaround the broken arm of faith.

3.Inside the church there's a begging bowlthat slowly lifts from the floorand floats along the pews.

The poem of Tranströmer's that spoke to me the most powerfully when I first read it was "After Someone's Death" ("Efter Någons Död"). The lines that follow here are more or less a hybrid of Bly's translation and a translation by Mary Hagen, a friend of many years who studied Swedish at the University of Minnesota. According to Robert Bly (in his comments in Friends, You Drank Some Darkness), Tranströmer wrote the poem after an uncle of his had died; it was also around the time of the assassination of John Kennedy, and (according to Bly) the two deaths became mingled as Tranströmer wrote the poem.

"One time there was a shock," writes Tranströmer, "that left after it a long, pale, shimmering comet's tail." He speaks in the poem of skiing slowly in winter sun, "through brush where a few leaves hang on."

They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat.But often the shadow feels more real than the body.The samurai looks insignificantbeside his armor of black dragon scales.

Tomas Tranströmer's first book of poems, 17 Poems, was published in 1954. His first three books, published over a period of eight years, contained a total of 52 poems. "With many English and American poets," writes Robert Bly, "this is considered to be about six months' work. [...] The first seventeen poems were enough for him to be recognized by many critics as the finest poet of his generation." Tranströmer has continued to publish books of poems every few years; his books have tended to be small (not a large number of poems) by the typical standards of the publishing business in the United States.

I appreciated this approach when I first read Tranströmer; my own books of poems (the ones I've published so far, and most of the other completed manuscripts and works in progress) have mostly been of the length commonly called "chapbooks." I tend to avoid the term when I talk about books. My feeling is that a book of poems is full-length when it has enough poems in it.

Although I generally like Robert Bly's translations of Tranströmer, Bly seems to me now and then to stray a little further from the originals than I would prefer. For instance, in one of the passages quoted above, Tranströmer says (about leaves hanging on bushes in winter) "They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories./ The subscribers' names swallowed up by the cold." Bly translates the second line simply as "Names swallowed by the cold." This turns the specific literal description of Tranströmer's original into a somewhat larger metaphorical statement. It's a subtle difference, though I might not have made the choice Bly made there. I've come across a few other such examples in Bly's translations.

There are other translations of Tranströmer I've liked; I think in particular of Baltics (Swedish title Östersjöar) translated a number of years ago by Samuel Charters, published 1975 by Oyez Publications (and which I don't have in front of me at the moment). I also somewhat like the translations by May Swenson and Leif Sjöberg in the selection Windows & Stones (1972, U. of Pittsburgh Press), though at times they seem a bit timid to me. I have a similar feeling about the numerous translations that have been done by Robin Fulton.

Over time Transtromer's poems seem to me to have taken on a gradually greater transparent quality. Or maybe it's the world (both inner and outer world) he writes about in his poems that has become steadily more transparent. He writes about an apparently ordinary moment or scene, looking out a window, walking across a street, a bit of conversation, a painting or a piece of music, and I find a consistent sense that there is some large piece of closely related business going on below, deep within the earth, sometimes as a soft echo, and sometimes surfacing in great clarity.

From the poem "After a Long Dry Spell" (in the book The Half-Finished Heaven, another selection translated by Robert Bly, published 2001 by Graywolf Press; the book gives only the English translations, not the original Swedish):

Circles swam on the fjord's surfaceand that is the only surface there is right now --the rest is height and depthto rise and to sink.

Two pine trunksshoot up and continue in long hollow signal-drums.Cities and the sun gone off.In the high grass there is thunder.

It's all right to telephone the island that is a mirage.It's all right to hear the gray voice.To thunder iron ore is honey.It's all right to live by your own code.

And this, from the poem "Street Crossing" (also in the selection The Half-Finished Heaven):

The street's massive life swirls around me;it remembers nothing and desires nothing.Far under the traffic, deep in the earth,the unborn forest waits, still, for a thousand years.

It seems to me that the street can see me.Its eyesight is so poor the sun itselfis a gray ball of yarn in black space.But for a second I am lit. It sees me.

Some additional biographical information about Tomas Tranströmer, and a fuller list of his works published in Swedish and in translation, is in the website of the Svenska Akademien, here. The webpage at this link is in English.

About Me

I've been writing poems for more than 45 years. Seven books of poems published; the most recent one is All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013). Several other manuscripts completed and some more in progress. Some poems, translations, essays, book reviews, etc., in magazines and anthologies over the years. My political activities started with a speech against the Vietnam War in my 9th grade English class. Have worked at various day jobs, mostly in large corporate offices talking on the phone and typing on computers. I've lived in Minneapolis most of my life.
In spite of sporadic indications to the contrary, history is not over yet. For this reason I continue to have hope. I continue to believe in the future.